Therefore a Cruel Messenger
by Liam the Genius
Summary: Novel-in-progress about the underbell of Rifts Chi-Town seen through three people peripherally related to the Coalition ISS Peacekeeping forces
1. Therefore a Cruel Messenger Chapter 1

Therefore a Cruel Messenger  
  
A Novel of Chi-Town  
by Liam the Genius liam72975@aol.com  
  
1  
It was New Years' Eve and it was snowing like crazy. Usually New Years was a night loud with singing, shouts and cries of revelry, but the snow seemed to eat the noise right up. The Tent Town dispatch station experienced the coming of the year 105 P.A. as a quiet sonata of distant, drunken hurrahs and auld lang syne's, along with whizzing of the occasional SAMAS overhead, going by on patrol.  
  
Midnight came and went innocuously, innocently. The clock counted off the minutes, 12:01, 12:02, 12:03. The people of the Burbs were singing and taking drinks and toasting each other; blowing off noisemakers, stealing kisses and making promises; hugging and clapping and telling themselves how this year was going to be different. No more meanness, no more stupidity. A straight life from here on in. Turn over a new leaf. Get a fresh start. Get citizenship. Get the hell out of the Burbs.  
  
By a quarter after, all the inhabitants of the Chi-Town Burbs had settled back down to business as usual: first an assault out by the canal. Vibro- blade, partial dismemberment. A drunk on a hover-cycle plowed into a shack, leveling the place. Nobody home, no fatalities. The drunk shredded by cracked plastic paneling. Disfigured, crippled. He'd live.  
  
Calls trickled in after that. Two cut'n'run artists nail some halfborg for his shiny new arm, leaving him in an alley leaking blood and hydraulic fluid. Then: juicers brawling like wild animals down near the Tent Town garbage dump, beating several passers-by-a lone woman and a trio of brothers-to a bloody featureless pulp. Then: a man's energy pistol, concealed in his trousers, accidentally went off; his entire left leg vaporized below the hip.  
  
Most frighteningly, a man reports seeing bright flashing lights and smelling "sulfur and brimstone" coming from his neighbor's house. He hears screams. He thinks: rift. He calls for help.  
  
Crying rift is no small matter: three minutes later a contingent of RCSG scientists and canine PSInet snoops are on the scene, backed up by a squad of infantry grunts in new Deadboy armor, a ponderous and impassive ambulatory tank of a "No-Neck" Mauler with guns at the ready, and a pair of hardcase NTSET commandos who seemed to pop out of nowhere, like rodents.  
  
The house is charred, smells of smoke and cooked meat. The Psi's sense nothing. Officers kick the door of the dwelling off its hinges. Inside: no rift, no demons. Just sparks and ashes. A cache of illegal fireworks and the corpses of the homeowner's two children, burnt to charcoal. One boy, one girl. Tentative ages pending postmortem: three and seven. The mother is apprehended as she returns home from a party, heavily intoxicated.  
  
Questions of jurisdiction arise when the ISS Inspectors from Chi-Town swoop in, wanting to take the homeowner into their own custody. The Chi-Town boys cold shoulder the Burbs Peacemakers; ransack the charred hovel; discover: the woman owned literature of a historical and academic nature. Contraband. They think she should be given a public trial; that it would make good propaganda: the typical, irresponsible Burbs single parent, filling herself with booze and illegal information as her children burn to death back home. It would make a damn good poster.  
  
The Burbs ISS Peacemakers complain bitterly, but they are outranked and outclassed-the Specters of Chi-Town are much more prestigious than their lowly Burbs counterparts. They throw their weight around with impunity. Chi- Town talks, the Burbs listen. That's the way it works. In the end, the Burbs Peacemakers release the mother from their custody. She goes to Chi- Town to be sentenced and stand trial. All present know she will be convicted and executed before week's end. The Burbs Peacemakers act like it was their choice.  
  
Peacemaker Buddy Powell alone at the Tent Town dispatch station, listening to the ISS shortwave, the rest of the force all out on double- duty holiday patrol. He took advantage of the privacy to haul out his digital vid-textbooks. With the station emptied, he could study them without taking any of the usual crap from his fellow Burbs officers:  
  
"Are you studying for the Inspector exams, Peacemaker Powell? Do you think they're going to take a Burb-scrubber like you in Chi-Town ISS? Maybe if you get a perfect score they'll let you roust bummed-out crash-heads way down on Level 4. Maybe they'll let you mop the puke out of the drunk tank. These are the Burbs, Peacemaker Powell. This is the shit end of the stick."  
  
An old Burbs Specter laid it out for him, tried to explain it compassionately: "The only way to leave Burbs ISS is to get carried out, Powell. No one gets promoted out."  
  
Powell thought that his fellow officers had no ambition. There were some Specters on the Burbs force but they were old and cynical; just marking time until their pensions kicked in. They hadn't been promoted from the Burbs, but demoted from Chi-Town. Drunks, nutcases, most of them. Or just plain incompetent.  
  
As for the Burbs Peacemakers, they didn't even register to take the Inspector exams while, in Chi-Town, men half their age were already Inspectors and intelligence operatives and decorated brass. The career fatalism in Burbs ISS was palpable, except with Buddy Powell, and that marked him as an outsider, an idealist, a cherry. A sucker. At twenty- seven, he had already risen as far as he could go as a Peacemaker, commanding men old enough to be his father. He wanted more. He was capable of more.  
  
He flicked the first vid on. The title: Comparative Humanoid Bloodstain Analysis. Holographic images of walls and clothes smeared with crimson fluid leaped to life before his eyes. He took out his fiber-optic light pen and moved methodically from chapter to chapter. He analyzed vectors, directionality, stippling, misting, ghosting, spining, splashing, coagulation, drip effects, arterial spurts, capillary action, stain ellipsis, satellite spatter. He ran spreadsheets of evaporation factors, of viscosity-over-time comparisons between the common humanoid types, of DNA differences between terrestrial and extraterrestrial species. His head swam in criminal-science terminology and mathematical formulae. There were six other vids in his desk: crime scene investigation, interrogation, surveillance, evidence-preservation, forensic pathology. He had read them all. His co-workers thought him both naïve and boringly bookish. Powell didn't care.  
  
He was set for the tests, he was ready. He could close his eyes and write those textbooks. Compulsively, he kept on studying, underlining, highlighting. Memorizing.  
  
He held off the futility he knew was there, around the edges of the page. The tests would only take him so far. He knew this. There had to be more. There had to be a miracle.  
  
He had the volume on the vid turned way up, listening for the fifteenth time to a distinguished Chi-Town ISS pathologist discussing the finer points of the human circulatory system versus that of various common D-Bee species.  
  
"Uhm.ah.sir." the man behind Powell cleared his throat. It was a rookie Peacekeeper under Powell's command. Only a few days out of the academy. He looked sick. Powell almost fell over himself shutting down the vid, sliding it back into his drawer as if it were an illegal novel. He turned to face the young man shaking in his body armor.  
  
"Sir, I.sir." the man stammered. Shaking very badly. Powell wondered if the man was on drugs. "It's horrible.all turned inside out.a man."  
  
Homicide was beyond his authority. He looked around the dispatch station. It was completely, utterly empty. Not a soul. It was his call, had to be his.  
  
"Where?" he said, already strapping and locking his helmet onto his head, slinging his laser rifle over his shoulder.  
  
"Out.on the west side, where Tent Town meets Scab Town. Down where those contaminated wells are."  
  
Powell nodded. "Put a call out to the scene. No one goes anywhere. No one touches anything. No one does anything. Tell them that this one's mine." He started thinking of ways to justify this to his superiors in the morning.  
  
Powell locked his desk drawer and left the rookie at the dispatch station without a backward glance.  
  
"And mind the radio."  
* * *  
Powell ran all the way; still too late. The spot: a secluded ditch near a pair of radioactive wells. The crime scene: tramped to slush by the boots of his 40-year-old subordinates, not looking at the corpse, not even trying to gather evidence. Helmets up, winking at female passers-by. Any footprints or tracks or useful bits of information trodden into the wet ground. He would have to poke around in the cold mud, then.  
  
Peacemaker Gottlieb said to Powell as he walked up: "I've been doing this eighteen years, and I seen some disgusting shit, but." He spat.  
  
Powell looked at the corpse and the sight hit him like a sledgehammer. His guts went watery. He understood why his men were trying to look elsewhere. It took all his reserves of professionalism to continue: he crouched, put his face close to the lacerated gore. He tried to see the scene as a vid-textbook, not as a mangled man. It wasn't a person, it was homework.  
  
Powell breathed slowly and evenly to control his nausea. He jacked up two portable light sources. He got started.  
  
Speaking into his personal recorder: "2:32 am. First Tent Town homicide, January 1, 105 P.A. Subject unclothed, appears caucasian male. Age.difficult to assess. I'm going to say early twenties. Roughly six feet tall. Probably killed elsewhere. Only a light dusting of ice crystals despite heavy snowfall. No melted snow or icy runoff on the corpse. It had time to cool before being dumped here. Preliminary estimation of time of death: late this afternoon. Distinctive tracks-" Powell looked at the trampled snow and glared at his subordinates, "-have been obliterated and impossible to recover. The face is extremely discolored and swollen."  
  
"No kidding," said Gottlieb, grinning. "His head's the size of a watermelon. That's what they call in Chi-Town a 'very pertinent observation.' Over here, it's a no-brainer. They letting you sweep homicides now, Peacemaker Powell?"  
  
Ignoring the interruption, Powell went on: "Subject likely received a massive beating in his final hours. Hair: brown. Eyes." Powell lifted a swollen eyelid with the tip of a metal pointer. "Eyes: unclear. Apparently gouged to pulp. Damp, blackish object protruding from mouth-possibly tongue. If so, very large and swollen. Skin has been cut open and pulled back over large areas of muscle tissue on extremities. Organs seem to have been removed through large incision in abdomen and.piled on chest. After death probably, there's not much blood. Much of the subject's lower torso is exposed cavity. The incisions are clean. There are multiple old and new heat trauma marks on lower torso, groin area and genitals. They appear to be the scars and blisters of old and new burns. His scrotum."  
  
Gottlieb again, pointing across the ditch: "I think that's it over there. Part of it, at least." Powell collected it in a baggie, continued.  
  
"There is.a small metallic computer chip on the surface of the exposed viscera." Powell examined it closely, wondered what it was. On a hunch, he lifted up the head of the corpse. "And there is IC bar-coding on the back of the neck. I don't have a scanner with me, but I'm going to assume that subject was psychic, and metallic chip was for ID coding purposes." Powell lifted the small metal dot from the twisted slop of organ tissue and bottled it.  
  
"Aww.now that just turns my stomach."  
  
Buddy Powell looked up at Gottleib, followed the man's line of sight. Down the alley, passing under the flickering yellow glow of a streetlight torch, there was a couple walking together, stumbling home, drunk, feeling romantic, holding each other tightly. The female: a buxom thirtyish brunette in a chunky wool and plastic snowsuit with a tattoo on her forehead, faded blue, of three interlocked circles-some sort of old gang symbol. She was pretty. The male: short, furry, barely clothed, clearly not human. A d-bee. It had the suggestion of a canine snout, but wasn't any sort of dog boy or anything. In the dim light, it was hard to tell what it was.  
  
Whatever it is, Powell thought, It must be pretty drunk to be openly wandering the streets, and in the arms of a human woman, no less.  
  
Powell heard the quiet thrum of a neural mace unholstered, saw Gottleib start down the alley towards the wobbling pair, blood about to be spilled.  
  
"Gottleib. Leave it."  
  
"C'mon, Powell," Gottleib slowed but didn't stop, "Isn't that disgusting?"  
  
"It's too disgusting to think about," said Powell. "But right now your job is not to regulate what's disgusting. Come back over here into the light. That's an order."  
  
Gottleib grudgingly holstered his neural mace and returned to the ditch.  
  
"So whad d'ya think?" said Hentoff, the short swarthy kid who was Gottlieb's partner. "Juicer, street gang? Wolfen? Demon?"  
  
Hentoff slurred his words around a wad of gum the size of a handball. Powell noticed that all his men were chewing gum furiously. He leaned over and sniffed.  
  
"Is that alcohol on your breath?"  
  
Gottlieb said: "Powell. It's New Years." Flatly. Neither denial nor apology. It made Powell furious. He put them all to work, assigned them to interview the people who lived on the surrounding streets. All eighteen hundred of them.  
  
His men cursed him to his face. They did as they were told.  
* * *  
The sun was cracking egg-yellow over the horizon and the Burbs people, at the end of their celebratory tether, were dropping like flies. There were some after-parties, all-nighters going for hair of the dog in a big way, hard core dopers dropping speed and crash to keep on going and going and going, but most people were stumbling home to sleep it off, or just passing out in the gray slush.  
  
Powell carefully bagged the corpse and put it on a porta-stretcher, called the med station for a body pickup. The med dispatch sounded drunk, refused to address Powell using proper protocol. He took the man's name to file a complaint when the next shift came on. He already had six other names on the list.  
  
He took three dozen photographs of the corpse in its surroundings, of the streets, the houses, the line of sight from the nearby pedways to the ditch. He got down to examining the scene.  
  
The ditch was full of garbage and its slopes had been stomped to mud soup by his men. He raked the slop with his gauntlet, slowly, looking for anything out of the ordinary. To start with he got weeds and dead grass and matchbooks and shell-casings and cigarette butts and drug baggies and false teeth and murderthon betting slips and d-bee porno and week-old rubbers and razor blades and a child's patchwork doll. The more he scraped, the more he found. It all looked old, all looked useless. He took it all, just in case. He used up all the evidence bags he had, then started putting stuff in his pockets. There was too much. Unprofessional in the extreme, but a reasonable compromise under the circumstances.  
  
Three hours later, the meat wagon still hadn't shown up. He had been squatting over the ditch the entire time. His eyes were feeling strained and dry from the long hours of staring and concentration. His back and neck were screaming from having to hold the same crouch for so long. He straightened up, tried to work the kinks out. Powell radioed the med station again. This time there wasn't even an answer. He hoped the dispatch had collapsed in a corner somewhere and choked on his own vomit. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining down from a cloudless sky on glistening Chi-Town and the rotten, wet Burbs. Powell took off his gauntlet and felt the dull black plastic of the body bag. The air was cold, but the bag was hot. Sucking up all that sunlight, raising the corpse's temperature degree by degree, accelerating tissue decay. He needed to get the body to a freezer, fast. He picked up the stretcher and, balancing one end on an anti- grav sphere and the other on the shoulder-plate of his Dead Boy armor, humped it two miles to the med station on his own, walking double-time the whole way.  
  
The place was virtually empty. Coroner nowhere in sight, dispatch snoring at the radio, hung-over med tech puking his guts out in the john. The intake man was semi-conscious, cradling a jug of homemade whiskey in his fat hairy arms, singing incoherently. Powell walked right in with the body, unchallenged. Walked right into examination room one, did the paperwork himself. Left the receiving signature blank.  
  
Unzipping the bag, he had an irresistible impulse: Forget these sloppy drunks, I'm doing this one.  
  
He had neither the skills nor the legal authority to autopsy anyone, much less a murder victim, but he was observant and he was sober, two things that no one else in the building could claim. Until now, he'd worked administration-assigning schedules, calculating overtime, spell-checking logs and daybooks-while his officers, incompetent old-timer ex-Specters, lied and boozed, shirked fieldwork and ignored cases. He knew how they saw this: just another sack of flesh on the slab. Just another killing. Just another dead Burbs scumbag. Nothing special. Seen one, seen em all.  
  
Powell looked down at the mangled body. He'd never handled homicide before. That was a Specter crime-not for Peacemaker investigation. But Powell had been in the Burbs long enough to know their drill: ask a few questions, break a few heads. Maybe railroad a psychic or d-bee sympathizer, get credit on their record for a solved case, a pat on the back, a nice cred bonus. In the end, they would achieve nothing. They would find no justice for the poor bastard on examination table 1. And Powell would still be working dispatch radio down in the Burbs.  
  
No, he thought. This is my body. I can do this.  
  
Hello miracle, hello ticket to Chi-Town.  
  
He had at first been sickened. Now he felt drawn. Standing there, he couldn't take his eyes off it, off of the hills and valleys and little neighborhoods of exposed organs, the culs-de-sac of glistening cavities, the hidden monuments of yellowy gristle and bone. He wanted to explore it like a map of unknown territory.  
  
And who cared if it was a psychic? Some people did. Powell certainly didn't.  
  
This one was his. It had to be, had to be. He caught it, he'd finish it. Somehow he'd stay on the case, somehow. There had to be a way. The Inspector exams were coming up-he'd ace them, but he knew he needed something else, something more. He knew what he had to do. Make a case. Nail the perp. Be a hero. Get justice. Get promoted. Get the hell out of the Burbs.  
  
Through the window and over the building-tops it was still dark enough to watch the predawn sky being carved up by blue-white searchlight beams on the gun turrets ringing the upper security halo of the city. In the Coalition med station, on the west side of the Burbs, the massive walled metropolis of Chi-Town would eclipse the sun when it rose.  
  
Powell shut the door quietly. The lock pipped closed. The instrument drawer with its jumble of dangerous honed chrome was already unlocked. He turned on his personal recorder and began a preliminary autopsy. 


	2. Therefore a Cruel Messenger Chapter 2

2  
ISS Commander Sphere Monk looked down from the balcony of a swank Chi- Town apartment at the sprawling Grey blanket of the Burbs and thought: My God, what a hellhole.  
  
The apartment wasn't his. He had come across a Coalition army general stumbling drunk in the Chi-town pub halls, glittery HAPPY NEW YEAR tiara on top of his black dress cap, harassing some society wife on the way home from a party. Monk was going to let it go, until the general exposed himself and Monk recognized the opportunity. He corralled the inebriated brass and got him to zip up, stand still, be quiet. He gave the woman a hundred to shut the hell up about the whole thing, hustled the general out of there. The woman was pretty drunk herself, and Monk was sure she'd have forgotten the incident with or without his intervention.  
  
He steered the man home-to this apartment-and put him to bed, burbling like a toddler, in a huge hand-carved four-poster that must have cost thousands. Monk had been in the army, and he knew the type: lion on the battlefield, baby in the barroom. The general had the piercing, queasy smell of synthetic gin sweating out of every pore, and Monk stopped short of undressing him, dumped him under the covers in full uniform, buttons and death-heads clanking dully, one chromed epaulet flapping undone. From the pictures in the hall, it looked as if the man had a wife and two kids, one boy one girl. The wife wasn't home-at least not in bed. Still out tying one on, Monk guessed.  
  
Monk vaguely knew the general-Canis was the name, if he remembered correctly-although he had never served under him. He mentally inscribed the man's name in the credit column of his favors ledger. Might be useful some day, if the man didn't get decommissioned for drunkenness in the meantime.  
  
Monk checked the place out. Quick sweep of cabinets and drawers. The general lived big. It was the kind of apartment that you see in holo-movies all the time but that no one has in real life. Big rooms, big windows, beautiful paintings, expensive furniture, balcony, full fridge, good beer. The apartment of a man with pull, with status. A man who could snap his fingers and get things done. It was a far cry from Monk's plain, modest quarters several levels down-not that he spent much time at home anyway. Monk saw that the general had some contraband books and vids, but not enough to make a fuss over. All the brass had them anyway.  
  
While Monk was admiring the place, the general's daughter woke up and peeped him from the doorcrack. A minute later, she came swooning out of her room, greeted him in flimsy pajamas, sheer, a size too small and half unbuttoned. Didn't even ask who he was. Tried to pull a Holo-wood low-lita routine on him. Sprawling on the couch with a tub of ice cream, licking vanilla swirl from her fingers for breakfast, pajama top flapping nonchalantly open as if she didn't even notice. Pouting. Asked if he had a girlfriend, a wife, a big gun. She looked sixteen, at most.  
  
Monk was repulsed. Her attempts at seduction would have been laughable if they weren't so earnest. The girl was nothing like Paulina.  
  
The general's daughter was still plain looking despite the best efforts of a half-dozen Chi-Town stylists, hairdressers, manicurists and body- sculptors; still sheathed in a childish covering of baby fat-a good, balanced diet and no shortage of food. None of the leanness or wiriness that would let her pass as anything other than what she was: a stupid, overgrown child.  
  
Like all kids raised in Chi-Town, like sheltered kids anywhere, she stayed young a lot longer than the kids in the dirty alleys. Physically, she could appeal only to a pedophile.  
  
But that was only half of it. It was the eyes. This girl had the dull bovine eyes of someone who watches too much holovision and believes everything she reads in magazines. The eyes of a person who's never had to make a hard decision in her life, never been beaten or kicked, never been abandoned, never had to sleep in the rain, never wished she was too proud to beg, never felt too hungry to be proud; looking down on the Burbs from her ivory perch, believing that life in the gutter could be exciting instead of sad. Ready to pimp herself for thrills instead of survival.  
  
In Monk's book, that made her more of a whore than any diseased alley- crawler in Tent Town.  
  
She was nothing like those girls down there in the Burbs. Nothing like Paulina. Who he had fallen in love with, whose life was in his hands, who had brought him back to life by giving him a reason to live. Nothing.  
  
The general's daughter was an altogether different animal. She was rich, she was spoiled, she was trouble. There was no question about that. Monk took one last look over the balcony, one last look around the apartment-the kind of apartment he would have someday-and he took off without even so much as looking at the whining brat on the couch, desperately trying to be nonchalant about letting her pajamas slip to the floor.  
  
Monk thought about Paulina, and if she had had enough to eat last night.  
* * *  
Sphere Monk had had a loving family, once. At least, he thought he did. His wife, Katherine, had seemed to love him. They'd been married for ten years now, going on eleven. She had been his high-school sweetheart. They'd sit around sipping Psi Cola, talking about running away together, imagining what their kids would look like, trying out names for girl babies and boy babies. They put the relationship on hold when he went into the army and she got busy building a career as a computer scientist studying the dynamics of emotion-emulation in robotic constructs. He did two four- year tours, back to back; scouting out by the Magic Zone, real dangerous stuff.  
  
One Christmas, Katherine designed a tiny feline bot that sought out Sphere in the field barracks. When it found him, around Easter, it relayed a message: "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life. Come back soon. Love, Katherine," and exploded in two to reveal an inner cache of flowers, long dead from dehydration and lack of sunlight.  
  
Monk took shrapnel in his hip and lungs saving two special-ops commandos; lost an eye and some cheekbone to a werewolf (replaced for free by his military health plan); came back to Chi-Town a decorated hero. Thirty-nine confirmed kills. When he got out of the service he settled down, joined ISS. Katherine became an eminent and well-paid mind in her field.  
  
He and Katherine got married. She had waited for him and had hardly even spoken to other men. He had never thought about other women. There was just the two of them in the world and that was it. They talked about kids like it was all they had ever thought about, and it was. She wanted boys, he wanted girls. They both wanted a lot.  
  
Their time together had been happy enough. Katherine worked in the private sector and made six times what Sphere did, and they lived extravagantly. There had been one child, in their fourth year of marriage. It had been born with a massive and irreparable coronary defect, and it died when it was only three days old, wheezing and blue in a tiny incubator unit at Chi- Town General. Sphere and Katherine cried for a week.  
  
The Coalition docs said that the defect had come from Sphere, from his side of the equation. Katherine's DNA was superb, she was perfect breeding stock. She would have made a good mother.but not with him. They fixed the one gene of Monk's that had caused the total malformation of the baby's cardio-pulmonary system, but advised him to refrain from having further children.  
  
"It's a mess in there," the gene doc said, tapping the hieroglyphic morse code of his DNA profile. "It won't be a heart defect next time, but it could be almost anything else. Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, leukemia, severe diabetes, gross physical deformity, psionics. You're a genetic minefield. Must've had some bad radiation growing up. The odds of you having a normal child are at best a hundred to one. You should think about getting a vasectomy."  
  
He was crushed. Katherine was crushed. No children. Not now, not ever. They thought about adoption. Neither of them wanted that. They stopped talking about adoption. They stopped talking about their future together. They just stopped.  
  
Monk asked her to divorce him, begged her to find another man. Katherine looked through him as if he were a phantom. He pleaded with her, remorseful then angry, then insistent then tender. Katherine held up her hand as if her wedding ring were a great weight. She said, "Sphere Monk, you are the rest of my life."  
  
Monk found he couldn't divorce her, either.  
  
One day Monk came home late from a double shift and found an infant's head on the kitchen table, next to the day's mail and a cup of cold tea. It smiled and seemed happy to see him. He screamed without sound, as in a dream. He knew the face. The eyes, the hair, the cheekbones, everything. It was him from his baby pictures. Its toothless gums worked delightedly as it cooed.  
  
Monk fell bloodless against the doorjamb. Katherine walked into the room, flushed glowing cheeks and blue eyes lit up with motherly happiness. Under her arm she clutched a headless infant torso, working some sort of tool or probe into the vacant neck, into the blinking lights and wiry servos and data ports bristling under a caul of plasti-flesh. She saw Monk's face and her smile evaporated. Monk stared horror into her eyes.  
  
"What?"  
  
Monk couldn't stop his hands trembling, his lungs moaning. He looked at Katherine.  
  
"Sphere, I built it," she said pleadingly.  
  
Monk launched forward and punched his wife in the mouth. She reeled across the room. Blood flew from her lips and nose and she dropped the kicking torso which landed with the distinctly muffled slap of baby fat on linoleum. Katherine fell on the carpet at the foot of the glass bookcase. The baby head on the table started crying.  
  
Katherine refused to move or get up. She lay on her side, stone- faced, staring at the leg of a dining-room chair. The shrieks of the disembodied head on the table ratcheted up in volume. Monk went out and closed the door behind him. He went to a bar and drank until he woke up in a Burbs movie theater rest room under a dried pasty sheet of his own vomit. He did not remember how he got there.  
  
Monk started staying away from home. He worked two, three, four shifts in a row. Volunteer for work whenever and wherever it was offered. He'd take anything: ISS police cases, temporary military commissions, private detective jobs for old army buddies. He'd sit around and write reports just for the hell of it. Anything to keep from going home. He'd be away from Katherine for days at a time, sleeping in the station, sleeping on undercover assignment, sleeping in APCs out in the field. He became known for his diligence and hard work. His superiors called him "a born Specter." He began to see promotions and medals handed his way. He got congratulatory postcards and phone calls from important people that he'd never met. Without any real ambition, without caring, he began to move up the ladder.  
  
Katherine quit her job. Their collective income plummeted. They moved into an apartment small enough for them to pay the bills and save a little on Sphere's salary alone. Katherine experimented with religion, therapy, drunkenness, drug addiction, yoga, karate, the clarinet and finally with other men.  
  
Everybody knew it. It was all over the department. Sphere became the subject of bartender gossip and locker room jokes: How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One. Just Sphere Monk. All the rest are too busy screwing his wife.  
  
The fall came fast. Sphere, too far gone to be hurt by any of it. Barely noticed. Drunk, starting to slip. Logging eighty-nine hours of on-duty per week. Barely slept. Drunk all the time. Looking ragged. Passed some internal line and kept going. Showed up drunk in civvies at the commencement of academy graduation. Tried to make a speech. Made a scene.  
  
It didn't take long for word to get around: Sphere Monk is all washed up.  
  
Private pain, then public scandal. Promotions, citations and congratulations all stopped. Upper-echelon department heads and politicians shied away from Sphere as it became evident his personal life was a mess and, worse, he was unable or unwilling to keep his mess private.  
  
Then Katherine fell in love. When it happened, it was with someone that Sphere hardly knew-a two-bit ISS Specter from the other side of the Chi- Town honeycomb, a vicious bull-shouldered scumbag named Sonny Blount who was open-secret on the take, a hustler with a badge. A real idiot, too, according to popular opinion in the department. All brawn, no brain. The guy was a monster. He was mean and he was violent and he didn't give a shit about anybody but himself. He was great at getting confessions.  
  
And he absolutely hated the department's honest, once-dependable workhorse and decorated war hero named Sphere William Evans Monk.  
  
Katherine fell for him, hard.  
  
They began seeing one another. Blount's name soon was implicated in illegal arms shipments to rebel groups. Unlicensed psychics, juicers, magic-users, historians. Real bad people. Blount claimed he was being framed, but the investigating officer-ISS Specter Sphere Monk-had evidence. He had him cold.  
  
Blount's connections in the department could have saved him; they had before. They could have had the whole thing swept under the rug, buried, but Monk made sure Blount couldn't dodge the bullet. Monk may have become a mess, but his reputation was still good for at least that much. Even a war hero disgraced has some pull. And he was a good Specter. He wrote the indictment so that no one could help Blount without dirtying themselves in the process.  
  
Monk had Blount bounced off the force for good. He tried to fit him in a capital case, treason, hoping for the death penalty, but it wouldn't stick. At no time during the trial was the personal connection between the two men revealed.  
  
After the hearing, they spoke face to face for the first time, bumping into each other in a courthouse restroom, Blount's bulk towering over Monk's lean, scrappy frame. Blount in expensive designer civvies, Monk in full Coalition ISS dress uniform, unshaved and bleary-eyed.  
  
"Disappointed?" said Blount.  
  
His hate was razor sharp, Monk forced himself formal: "You're a disgrace to the uniform. You got off easy. If I see you again, I'll run you in and have the Psi's give you the third degree."  
  
"She hates your guts, you know. That ain't any of my doing. You think it is, but you better look in the mirror if you want to know why she's going crazy. I could have you ripped apart, I still might. You're doing a pretty good job of it yourself in the mean time." Blount didn't seem angry. He smiled at Monk.  
  
Sonny Blount broke it off with Katherine, dropped her cold. Department gossip hinted that Blount had gotten her pregnant and bullied her into getting an abortion. Maybe there was truth to that. Sphere doubted it. He had his own theory when he'd drank enough: Blount was punishing him by giving him his wife back, broken, emotionally crippled. Unable to do anything but hate him, hate his goodness, hate his screwed up DNA. Sphere took to sleeping at his desk. He hardly ever went home. Sometimes he called up drunk to weep apologies. The other end of the line always remained dead silent for minutes that seemed hours. Then a click.  
  
Sphere fell in love. Boozing incognito in some dim, wood-paneled Burbs bar filled with hawkish predators and brain-dead locals drinking straight synthetic ethanol and antifreeze. Monk found himself being chatted up by a young woman over shots of homebrewed potato vodka. She was a hooker. He knew, he didn't care. She was nice to look at. She was short, with a skinny frame, long brown hair, and twinkling chestnut eyes that looked too good to be anything but store bought. They were real, though. She said her name was Paulina. He told her he had a badge, he was ISS. A Specter. She didn't even flinch.  
  
"Everybody's gotta make a living," she said, and she toasted him, drinking her shot and his. She smiled. She made a gun with her fingers, pressing the soft barrel of her index finger into Sphere's chest. "Bang," she said as the hammer fell.  
  
Sphere took her back to a bungalow that could be rented hourly. She took her skirt off, left her shirt on. They made love. They talked. After the heels and the makeup came off, he saw that she wasn't a woman at all. She was fifteen. She was, in ISS parlance, a "low-lita": a young Burbs girl, orphaned, homeless, destitute; prostituting herself for food; specializing in looking old beyond her years to snag a slumming thrill-seeker from Chi- Town and, hopefully, get pregnant with some citizen's child and maybe move on up to the good life.  
  
That was the plan, at least. Mostly, the low-litas had to be fished out of the canal, floating face down, bloated beyond all girlishness with the wet rot unique to waterlogged corpses. Two or three turned up dead every week. No one took much notice.  
  
The next week, he went back to see her again. Not her customer; her suitor, eventually her lover. He brought her flowers and food. They told each other the story of their lives. Her story was much longer. They delved into each other's foibles, their embarrassments. She showed him that the left cup of her brassiere was empty, stuffed with a plastic bag full of birdseed. He looked perplexed.  
  
"It's the only thing that looks right under a t-shirt," she told him.  
  
She said she had had breast cancer at age ten, a mastectomy at eleven. Radiation or contaminated food or environmental toxins, she didn't know. Public service said the Burbs environment was safe and healthy. She knew that was bullshit. Her surgery was paid for by a Burbs charity organization. They gave her a room during her convalescence during which they tried to recruit her as an informant on her fellow Burbs dwellers. Three weeks, and then back out on the street. Here's some vitamins, try not to get infected, they told her. When she hit puberty, her one good breast grew in only slightly, but she still looked lopsided. That's where the bag of birdseed came in. Sphere called her his little amazon. Kissed the broad rumpled scar.  
  
Sphere spent all his free time with her in the Burbs.  
  
One day she wasn't at their bar when he expected her to be. Wasn't at their bungalow. Wasn't anywhere. Sphere went crazy. Scoured the Burbs. Every night checking the med station morgue for Paulina's corpse. Every sleeping moment he nightmared: her, ripped open, mangled by monster or street gang or psycho juicer.  
  
Two weeks went by. He had every jurisdiction from Lone Star to Quebec sending him images of DOAs fitting Paulina's description. In the Burbs, he put out a bulletin with her picture on it. WANTED FOR QUESTIONING, it said. A Burbs Peacemaker found her sleeping in an old unused coal bin when he went to take a leak. She was taken into custody.  
  
In custody: he had to at least go through the motions of grilling her in the interrogation room before he could have her turned loose. He didn't know why she had disappeared on him. He felt hurt. In the cold steel room he came at her with an unsoftened interrogation tone. Hard core, in her face, all shouts and barks and growls.  
  
He asked her why she had been avoiding the ISS. She said she didn't even know the Specters were looking for her. He asked how old she was. She said fifteen. He asked her how old she really was. She said fifteen. He asked if she had anywhere to live. She said no. He asked if there was anyone looking for her. No one who wants to find me, she said. He asked if she was a "low- lita." She asked what that was. He said it was a girl who screws Chi-Town citizens and then shows up on their doorstep with a baby, looking to get in. She said that that was not her. He asked her if she thought he was blind or stupid. She said no. He asked her how she did not fit the description of a low-lita.  
  
She looked at him, bullet-hard chestnut gaze penetrating deep into his own eyes, said: Because I'm pregnant with a citizen's baby now, and I haven't told him.  
  
Sphere froze. He backed off. His heart pumped: take her in your arms. It pumped: you want this. It pumped: genetic minefield. His knees were weak. He asked a few more perfunctory questions and she was released. They met later at the bungalow. He asked why she ran. She told him to go away, that she would only wreck his life and his career. He kissed her and told her to shut up. He told her about his DNA. They talked about it a long time. They talked about the future.  
  
Reascending. Sphere Monk started putting in normal hours at work. He slept home most nights. Stopped drinking, tried to. Katherine's affairs, if they still went on, were conducted more privately. Sphere was regaining the good favor of the commanders up top. Slow. He was again a model officer. Word traveled: drunk Monk is jockeying for an administration job, a promotion with all the gold stars and sweet perks. He's looking for an office and a little pull in the department. Crossing every t, dotting every i and kissing every ass.  
  
After a while, some fish nibbled.  
* * *  
Colonel Carol Black, head of PSInet division, looking elegant and demure in a gray flannel suit and steel-rimmed glasses, shoe-polish-black hair pulled back in a savagely tight ponytail. Lieutenant Jack Cavanaugh, notorious NTSET goon and Chi-Town skullcracker, going gray at the temples; sunglasses, plain black coat and tie over an athlete's build, stirring a bloody mary with the pinky of a steel hand.  
  
Lunch at a nondescript, low-level Chi-Town food court. Mawkish shopping- music thrummed in the drab, neon-speckled eating hall.  
  
Black: "Happy New Year."  
  
Sphere nodded, ordered scrambled eggs and toast from a passing waiter. He said to Cavanaugh, "A little early for shades, isn't it?"  
  
Cavanaugh lifted the frames slightly. His eyes were clear and alert, but the eyelids and sockets were yellowish, like an old bruise. "New implants," he said. "Still a little photosensitive."  
  
"I'm glad to see that you've decided to take me up on my offer," said Black.  
  
"You haven't made an offer," said Monk. "You just asked me to meet you here. I'm here. Make me an offer and I'll think about it."  
  
Black raised an eyebrow and Cavanaugh grinned. The waitress brought Sphere's eggs, watery and underdone. Sphere ate and studied his interlocutors. Black: portrait of competence; educated, well-spoken, smart. The kind of woman that gave psychics a good name. She'd headed up PSInet for as long as he could remember. A reputation of being overly harsh with her own kind. That was probably in her best interests. Sphere knew she could do things for him. She was very influential and very sneaky.  
  
Then "Crazy" Cavanaugh: still kicking after two decades of taking risks that, statistically, should have caught up with him long ago. He'd personally bagged more demons and monsters than whole army companies. He wasn't just like the other guys in NTSET, he was NTSET. Hunting down illegal supernatural entities in Chi-Town sewer pipes was like a walk in the park for him. Sphere knew his rep as an army hawk was all smokescreen: he was wilier than Carol Black in a lot of ways, and could be even more dangerous with a single phone call than with a laser rifle. He was connected up, down, all over the place.  
  
Getting old-the gray told you that-and doing less trigger-work and more black-bag stuff. He looked like a grunt but had more power than he let on. If half of the rumors were true, then just about every big deal that went down in Chi-Town had Cavanaugh's hand in there somewhere. He was a Man to Be Seen With.  
  
The two made for a strange pairing. Black the image of propriety and correctness-she looked as if she even farted by the book. Cavanaugh the kind of guy that ate the book for breakfast and asked for seconds. Both manipulative and ambitious, that linked them. That led them to Sphere.  
  
"How would you like to ruin some lives," said Cavanaugh.  
  
Sphere shrugged. "Whose life?"  
  
"We're not ruining lives," said Black. "I've been given a mandate by the Proseks to set up a new task force to investigate the involvement of Chi- Town citizens and Burbs dwellers with certain revolutionary groups and illegal organizations. Terrorists and scholars, mostly. We're to gather intelligence on these organizations and compile incriminating dossiers on their members. This information will eventually be forwarded to the Proseks themselves."  
  
Sphere said: "And what will our great leaders do with this intelligence?"  
  
"Jack off to it, probably," said Cavanaugh as he tapped a passing waiter for another bloody mary and saluted no one in particular.  
  
"So far, we've been striking on the outside of these organizations," said Black, ignoring Cavanaugh. "The periphery. The men and women we have already executed have all been little fish. They knew nothing. And every trial and execution only strengthens the resolve of these people. The more we persecute them, the more they feel their cause is worthy, the easier it is for them to persuade impressionable minds to support their cause. We need to get inside these organizations. To find their leaders and get some leverage on them. To tarnish and discredit them. To tear them down from within."  
  
"And this is what the Proseks want you to do," said Sphere. "When the threat of death fails, the threat of blackmail will succeed, is that it?"  
  
"Something like that," said Black.  
  
"What do you do?" said Sphere.  
  
"I will coordinate the operation, act as a liaison between you two and the Proseks, and interrogate all informants that you manage to turn."  
  
"What about him?" indicating Cavanaugh.  
  
"Same as you. It'll be a two-pronged attack. The two of you will go to work on groups of dissidents. Infiltrate them, and find out everything you can about their members and leaders. Then we will use this information to squeeze the cell leaders, to get them to reveal the names of the big men in the organization."  
  
"Us? Infiltrate?" Sphere was incredulous. "I've been a cop and a soldier for almost twenty years. They can smell that on you, even if I grow out the buzz cut. And him-" again indicating Cavanaugh, "-he's nuts. Besides, there isn't a revolutionary within two hundred miles who hasn't had a friend shot in the back by Crazy Cavanaugh. They all know his face. They all know his knuckles."  
  
"I know that my reputation precedes me," said Cavanaugh, tipping an imaginary hat with exaggerated severity. "Oh, I've cracked enough worthless jaws to become famous among the festering community of grumbling traitorous filth that surrounds our glorious state. It is something I have always felt complimented by. And no, you and I will not personally be infiltrating any organizations."  
  
"If not us, who?"  
  
"We will each be operating a mole, a young man or woman with a fresh face and an aptitude for work of this sort. We will need someone who can pass for an idealist-which obviously leaves both of us out-but who can observe and maneuver like a true spy. I've got my man already."  
  
"And me?"  
  
"I imagine you'll recruit yours from your department."  
  
"From my.?" Sphere paled at the thought of working closely with anyone from his department. How many ISS Specters does it take to screw in a light bulb? "I'm not sure." he began.  
  
"In this matter, you'll have carte blanche within ISS," said Black with assurance. "You may choose whomever you like."  
  
Sphere gathered all this in. Nodded to himself, slowly. "Now lets talk about what I get out of this."  
  
Black sipped her tea. Then she put a clunky badge on the table and rapped on it with her knuckles. "Promotion to Deputy Chief Inspector. On your own, you probably could have had it without my help.if you hadn't self- destructed in a cloud of alcohol and disgrace." With her fingertip, she pushed the death-head shield across the table towards Sphere Monk. "It would put you back on the inside track with ISS, this time with a substantial head start. You could be head of the whole department in five, six years maybe. Chi-Town would be yours."  
  
Sphere laughed heartily. It was the most genuine laugh he had had in a long time.  
  
"Stay with ISS? Not a chance. What I want is to be done with ISS completely. Done with the whole cops and robbers thing. Done with killers and thugs and druggies and D-bee scumbags and cyborgs and psychics. If I do this, I want you to get me out of ISS and into a desk job. Someplace where I can sit on my ass all day and drink coffee and never have to worry about getting shot at or eaten by demons."  
  
Cavanaugh began to rock back on his chair and stare at the ceiling absently, deep in thought. Eventually, he suggested: "ISS Anti-Contraband Service?"  
  
"And have to look for drugs and illegal magic scrolls in d-bee asses all day? Take away family Bibles from little old ladies? Be serious."  
  
"I can sense you already have something in mind," said Black. "Why don't you just say what it is?"  
  
Sphere knew she could just go in and take the information out of his brain if she really wanted to. He felt the tight, hypodermic pinprick of her mind investigating the porous perimeter of his surface thoughts. He willed himself calm, willed himself not to vibe duplicity, fear to her. He resolved never to give her a reason to take a serious peek inside his skull.  
  
"Crouch is old," said Sphere, willing the vibe crass. He gave it his best evil-eye poker face. "He'll retire soon, if he doesn't drop dead first. I'd like his job when he finishes."  
  
Cavanaugh stopped rocking. The front legs of his chair snapped against the tiled floor with an audible TANG across the food court. He leaned forward on the table.  
  
"Crouch who?" said Black.  
  
"Santley Crouch," said Cavanaugh. He looked with quizzical, bruised eyes over the top of his sunglasses at Sphere Monk. "The head of the immigration board. He's the guy who decides who gets to leave the Burbs and who has to rot there."  
  
"Interesting choice," said Black. The pinprick retreated. "Why?"  
  
The question was directed at Sphere, but Cavanaugh picked it up: "It's a peach assignment. You pretend to flip through applications while collecting bribes and kickbacks from the people you give citizenship to. Everyone in the Burbs will do whatever it takes to get on your good side. So will everyone in Chi-Town because everyone's got someone that want to get citizenship for. As long as you keep things on the quiet side, you'll be set for life. Like Crouch." Cavanaugh munched a celery stalk.  
  
Sphere pretended to look impressed. He looked at Black and did not affirm or deny Cavanaugh's statement.  
  
"Sounds like an intelligent choice," said Black.  
  
"A strange one, too," said Cavanaugh, "for the golden boy of the department. It takes a low man for that kind of work. I wouldn't mind it myself, you know, but there's not enough action for my blood."  
  
"Everyone used to know me as the golden boy," said Sphere. "Not any more. Now they know me as the drunk who used to sleep in the station locker room all the time. Let's put our cards on the table. You know I've been having some.personal troubles lately. Otherwise you would have picked someone else. You asked me here because you heard I'm trying to get my life back on track, but the train's already left the station. You heard I'm desperate for a promotion, but that I've already blown my shot. You heard that without some help I'm dead in the water, career-wise."  
  
"Yes, I've heard all that," said Black.  
  
"You'd need to be frigging deaf not to hear it," said Cavanaugh, hailing a waitress for another bloody mary.  
  
"And," said Monk, not finished yet, "and, I'm guessing the reason this whole thing is being done with a light touch-by infiltration instead of extermination-is that you're thinking you might be investigating some important and well-connected Chi-town citizens, maybe even some family friends of the Proseks, and this whole thing could very easily turn around and bite you on the ass."  
  
Black frowned. "It wasn't something I was planning on. The goal of the operation is the compromise of these organizations and their leaders, not necessarily their destruction. They could be manipulated by the Coalition to great advantage."  
  
"And," said Monk, "If the whole thing does blow up in your face, you'd need some credible fall guys to take the flack for you-say, an aging NTSET psycho and a fallen-angel ISS Specter with a very public history of personal problems."  
  
"Heyyyy," said Cavanaugh, grinning. "He's not as stupid as he looks."  
  
"That's not part of the plan either," said Black.  
  
"What she means," said Cavanaugh, "is that it's up to us not to get bitten on the ass. I know I can handle it. I'm not so sure about you."  
  
"I have the utmost confidence that you will both be able to handle it in your own respective ways," said Black, a little too confidently, a little too patronizingly.  
  
The food-court's background music changed to a more upbeat electro-Latin groove, an afternoon ersatz-salsa bop. The hundreds of hungover diners at the food court groaned in unison at the shrill, bright squeaks of the synthesized horn section.  
  
"Well," said Cavanaugh. "Now that we've given you the whole routine. Are you in?"  
  
"Can you get me Santley Crouch's job?"  
  
"I'll look into it," said Black. "If he's retiring, like you say, I'm sure the vacancy can be held for a decorated war hero like yourself. Especially after becoming the first ISS Specter to infiltrate an illegal ring of dissidents operating within Chi-Town."  
  
Sphere Monk accepted that as the best answer he was going to get. He rolled the pros and cons around in his head for a minute, feeling weight come down real hard on the con side. Cavanaugh and Black were serious operators; he was the odd man out. If things went badly, he knew it'd be his neck in the noose. Monk made the only decision he could.  
  
"Yeah, sure, I'm in," he said. He thought it was a bad idea, but he knew it might be his last chance, his only chance. He thought of Paulina, and thought of their unborn child. He didn't want his kid being born in the Burbs, or Paulina being cut half-assed Caesarian by some drugged-out bodydoc with dirty hands. She already needed medical attention but there were no obstetricians in the Burbs. The baby wouldn't wait forever. The clock was ticking. He couldn't wait.  
  
"As soon as I find my man, I'll be ready to go." 


	3. Therefore a Cruel Messenger Chapter 3

3  
"Hello? I'm looking for Sonny Blount, please."  
  
"Speaking."  
  
"My name is Rand Huberman. I got your connect-serial from Katherine Monk. I'm having a little bit of a problem, and she told me that I should call you."  
  
"Katherine? That's a name I didn't want to hear. Why did Kate tell you to call me?"  
  
"She said, well.she."  
  
"Don't tell me. She said I was a real scumbag and that I hurt people for money. Didn't she."  
  
"Oh no, it's just she.she.ehhh."  
  
"Well I am and I do. If that's what you want, say it. If not, disconnect right now."  
  
"Fine. Fine. I'll say this: I need you to take care of a personal problem I'm having. It's been bothering me for a long, long time and I need to do something about it or I'll go crazy."  
  
"I'm not a psi-therapist. Get to the point."  
  
"It's my daughter."  
  
"You want me to hurt your daughter."  
  
"No! No! Her boyfriend.I mean.the thing she's been running around with."  
  
"Thing."  
  
"Some godawful creature. A d-bee of some sort, down in the Burbs. I think their relationship has gotten.sexual. It needs to stop."  
  
"What kind of d-bee?"  
  
"I don't know. Big, scary eyes, hairy all over, evil-looking. It's like a nightmare. A d-bee."  
  
"You want to know anything or you just want him out of the picture?"  
  
"Just get rid of him. It, I mean. I don't want to know anything. Just do it."  
  
"Gimmie a figure."  
  
"A figure?"  
  
"Money."  
  
"Oh. Oh. Of course. Five thousand."  
  
"Uh-uh. Gimmie another number. One with at least four zeroes."  
  
"Ten thousand?"  
  
"That's a pathetic offer, but I'll accept it. As long as it's in cash."  
  
"How will I get it to you?"  
  
"You know the Chi-Town offices of Northern Gun?"  
  
"Yes, they're near our research labs."  
  
"Drop the money, the address and the instructions off there. I'll take care of the rest. Make sure you don't put my name on the package. Leave it care of Mr. Vin de Siecle."  
  
"Wonderful. Thank you so much, Mr. Blount. I am really in your debt. I won't forget this."  
  
"I know you won't. Now lose this serial and don't ever call me again."  
* * *  
Sonny hopped a commercial trans out of the low levels, over to the offices of his sometime employer, Vincent de Siecle, and enjoyed the cross- level culture shock as he traveled out of the dregs and on up to the lofty level that housed Northern Gun's Chi-Town suite. Clothes became cleaner, facial expressions sharper, eyes more focused, haircuts neater, gaits less ambling and aimless. On the upper levels, storefronts were better-tended; the pedways free of litter and the gutters free of urine, the walls were untouched by graffiti. In the upper levels, there were no drug-heads sprawled unconscious in alley corners. There were no drunks vomiting on themselves.  
  
Sonny stopped in the office just long enough to pick up his package, not long enough to speak to any of the secretaries. When he plowed through the offices like he owned the place, a six-foot-eight bulldozer of muscle exuding his own gravity field that kept most sane people beyond arm's length, he knew he scared the hell out of everyone but there was nothing to be done about it. He had tried to sweet talk the girls when he first started working for de Siecle, but whenever he called one of their names, they flinched and got this glazed look in their eyes like they had just been smacked. After a few days, he stopped trying. It wasn't as if he wanted for women. Fuck it.  
  
He hopped another trans to a cheap food court. He grabbed some cheeseburgers, onion rings, half a fried chicken, four bottles of beer. He went home, opened the package, and ate his breakfast.  
  
Inside the package, two visuals: a graduation pic and a telephoto spy-style snapshot. The girl in the graduation shot was pretty. Nothing special, thought Sonny, but pretty. Blonde hair, perfect teeth, blue eyes. She was made almost homely by her perfectly average perfection. There was a name underneath: Alicia Huberman.  
  
The other photo showed a completely changed woman. Gone the blue cap and shapeless grad gown. Gone the simple smile. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, wearing painted-on shorts and a halter top so transparent as to be almost imaginary, she was standing within what looked to be an average Burbs alleyway between the tarpaper backs of two shantytown houses. She didn't look so dull in that picture. Her body was pure dynamite, and she looked like she had had some practice using it.  
  
Standing with his arm around her bare shoulders was a fairly unimposing d- bee, a far cry from the monstrous mental picture her shame-ridden father had drawn for him. The creature was barely taller than the girl. Sonny couldn't tell what the hell species it was. Hairy, but not wolfen or dog- boy hairy. It was square-proportioned, like a dwarf, but too tall and too hirsute to be one. It had a massive brow and a distinctly rippled look to its cranium, as if its head were covered in bony ridges. Sonny couldn't tell for sure from the photo. With a loose sweatshirt and baggy pants, the thing could easily have passed for human.  
  
He shouldn't be too tough, Sonny decided.  
  
He committed both photographs to memory. One thing Sonny had had since he was a kid was a perfect memory for faces and people. It had gotten him in trouble before.  
  
The ten-thousand was all there, wrapped in notepaper carrying the location of a house on the Burbs outskirts, in the Trash Town neighborhood. Sonny changed into dirty, threadbare clothing. His regular attire would attract too much attention along the dirt alleys of the Burbs.  
  
He took a lift down to ground level, hassled with paperwork like a good citizen. He tried not to think about the days when he could have badged his way through the guards. Got cleared to enter the Burbs, stepped through the checkpoint airlock.  
  
He walked into the permeating stink of the Burbs and stopped as dead as if he had walked into a brick wall. He knew it wasn't anything you could prepare yourself for, so he hadn't even tried. The ferocity of the stench still took him by surprise, always, every time. It was as if the air itself was a dead, rotting animal that had taken up residence inside his sinuses.  
  
God, he hated the Burbs.  
  
Still, money was tight. Freelance knuckle jobs weren't Sonny's style, but letting himself get kicked out of ISS had cost him a lot of contacts. A lot of money. He'd been useful as a man on the inside. It was worth a lot of money to a lot of people to have an ISS Specter on payroll. Without a badge he was just another thug. Sonny accepted he'd have to break a few kneecaps now and again if he wanted to maintain his lifestyle. He'd been okay for a while, but his savings were thinning out and handmade suits don't grow on trees.  
  
He didn't know why Katherine Monk had given the desperate dad his connect- serial. Not that he minded the work. But he was done fooling with Katherine and he had told her as much the last time they had spoken, which was months ago, right around the time her alcoholic war-hero husband had gotten him dishonorably discharged from ISS and almost imprisoned.  
  
It was typical. Sonny didn't really know Sphere Monk, only by rumor and reputation. But it sounded typical of him. Any real man would have at least tried to give Sonny a few rail-gun rounds in the head. Not sterling Sphere Monk. He found the man who was screwing his wife and had him brought up on charges. And not fake ones, either-these were real charges. It wasn't as if Sphere had framed Sonny for crimes he had never committed. That at least would have taken some balls.  
  
No, Sonny had done everything Sphere accused him of, and a hell of a lot more. It was a weak, stupid move on Sphere's part. All Sonny would have to do was tell the court that he was sleeping with the prosecuting officer's wife and there would have been an immediate and very embarrassing mistrial.  
  
Enter: Vin de Siecle, regional head of operations for Northern Gun. Weapons- merchant, financier, a mover in the Chi-Town underworld, friend to high politicos and Coalition brass. Very connected, very rich. He dropped 95 grand in Sonny's lap and made him an offer: I need a good man. Forget ISS. Come work for me.  
  
Sonny, tired of being a glorified errand boy with a badge. He had seen de Siecle's offer as a golden opportunity. Get out of ISS, get into the power elite of Chi-Town. Goodbye life as a dirty Specter, goodbye fixing other people's messes. Hello political clout, hello life as a rich and powerful businessman. Just like de Siecle.  
  
Sonny had been wrong, all wrong. It hadn't worked out the way he thought it would. Actually, in retrospect, it had been the worst move of his life.  
  
Now he had become, more or less, de Siecle's two-fisted lackey. Some intimidation, some intelligence, some industrial snooping, a lot of violence. Nothing requiring too much brains. He hurt a lot of people, which he was good at, but it bored him.  
  
He maimed people against whom de Siecle had his queer inexplicable vendettas. He pushed de Siecle's phony rebate schemes on pliable customers, he paid off dirty accountants and strong-armed the honest ones, he assaulted any financial investigators who came sniffing around and made it look like ordinary street crime. He vandalized stores not carrying Northern Gun products. He put violent muscle behind de Siecle's plan to force small- time backwater merchants all over the territory to carry Northern Gun armaments at inflated retail prices but with reduced profit margins. All of the additional dividends went right into de Siecle's pocket. That was about it for Sonny Blount these days.  
  
It was trifling shit, and he hated it.  
  
And the money. The money he was getting from de Siecle wasn't cutting it. It was a steady check, but Sonny knew he was being strung along. De Siecle probably thought he was putting a real good one over on poor, dimwitted Sonny Blount. That's what everyone always thought. De Siecle's pay was better than his old ISS salary, a lot better, but he wasn't pulling all the extra perks and kickbacks that you can pull when you're a dirty ISS fixer- for-hire. Which brought Sonny to his present endeavor.  
  
Without too much trouble, Sonny found the house in the Burbs, a shack wood- pulp and plastic, no windows, mottled yellow insulation fluffing out from cracks in the walls. The snow was still lying lightly on the ground, and Sonny didn't want to leave tracks leading up to the front door. At a distance, he circled the place twice but there was no other entrance, the front door the only option. Hell with it, he thought.  
  
The door looked to be blast-reinforced and had about seven locks-odd, he thought, on such a ramshackle building. He guessed it would be pretty difficult to pop it open by force alone. The issue was settled when he tried the handle and found the door unlocked.  
  
The place was quiet. It smelled strongly of sweat, urine and feces. Closing the door, Sonny was enveloped by complete darkness. There was a flashlight concealed in the artificial knuckle of his left index finger; he popped it on. The place was better looking on the inside that its outward appearance would lead one to believe. The walls were thick, sturdy, heavily padded with sheets of expensive foam-core ridge layering.  
  
Soundproof, Sonny guessed. He stopped worrying about having to be quiet.  
  
He was in a small alcove filled with shelf upon shelf of vid equipment: lenses and lights and cables and holo cams and other kinds of expensive electronics. And a small library of discs labeled only with colored decals and serial numbers. Meticulous. Everything clean, everything well-ordered.  
  
Sonny pocketed a handful of the discs. The room beyond the alcove held nothing but a wooden chair and a greasy, beat-up mattress on the floor. Oily waxpaper wrappers-the kind in which most Burbs fast food products were packaged and sold-littered the floor like wild plants. There were what looked and smelled like dog turds in the corner.  
  
No food, no entertainment, no windows, no real furniture. Nothing that indicated habitation. One locked door in the far corner of the room. The only lights were expensive standless spot-lamps for picture-taking, hovering ghostly along the walls. He had been given a bum address. No one lived here.  
  
He gave the place a quick and messy tossing anyway. If he was going to find the girl or the d-bee, he was going to have to come up with some info. A connect serial, an address, something. Wandering the Burbs flashing photographs and asking questions wasn't going to cut it. This whole deal was looking more and more rotten. He had been paid to hurt someone, not perform an investigation. This made things more difficult and it made Sonny angry.  
  
Two minutes told him the main room held nothing of interest. Conspicuously so. It's very rare that, in any given room, there will be absolutely no connections to the outside world. Deliberate? He wondered. Why all the damn secrecy?  
  
He noticed that the dealer's imprint, serial numbers and even brand names had been neatly filed off all the vid equipment. The food wrappers told him that someone had recently gotten takeout from Uberburgers, but that was it.  
  
The place was a holo-movie set of some sort, he knew that much. Porno, probably. The Burbs wasn't the kind of place that produced a lot of educational documentaries. He went to the locked door and tried to kick it off its hinges. Reinforced, it barely budged. He kicked three more times and the hinges ripped out of the doorframe, wrenching the moulding away from the wall and popping nails out of the wood like buckshot. They skittered across the plastic-tiled floor.  
  
Inside was a functional production suite, complete with nonlinear editing computers, multi-frame monitors and wall-unit digital archives. And human body. Sonny felt along the wall for a light switch. He flipped it on.  
  
It looked like the man was dead. He was tied to a chair, blindfolded and gagged, and he was covered in dried blood that had come from two lacerations on the scalp and a long slender crater of flesh on the back of the head, deep enough to expose a tiny triangle of the man's skull. Sonny was leaning over him to go through his pockets when his eye caught the slight movement of lungs lifting. Sonny stood back.  
  
The man was breathing shallowly, but he was breathing. Sonny removed the blindfold and gag.  
  
The man flopped as if he was a rag doll. Sonny stood there for a minute, two minutes, getting more and more pissed. The man sat there limply, not moving a muscle. Sonny grabbed the man's hair and pressed down on one wound with his thumb, digging the edge of his thumbnail into the raw pulpy redness. The man jerked, screamed. Sonny eased the pressure.  
  
"Oww, wait.please, please." said the man, lifting his face. His eyes held desperation and terror. "Please.I don't know what you want, but."  
  
The man was in his early 20's, it seemed. Under all that blood it was hard to tell. Late teens maybe. Just a kid.  
  
"Why were you pretending to be unconscious?" said Sonny.  
  
"What do you want? Listen, there's no money here, but there's drugs.lots of them. Take them, please, just don't kill me."  
  
Sonny's ears perked up. "Where?"  
  
"In that top drawer. Dial 22 77 104 to open it."  
  
Sonny opened the drawer. It wasn't a lot. Probably what the kid thought of as being a lot. Stims, depressos, racers, chasers, hallucinics; there was a decent variety. Sonny mentally calculated their value.  
  
"Who do you think I am?" he said.  
  
The kid closed his eyes tight. "Oh god. I don't know, I don't know. Really. I swear, I'll never remember your face. I didn't mean to look. I didn't get a good look."  
  
Sonny laughed. "No, that's not what I meant. Who did this to you?"  
  
"You didn't.you mean you're not." the kid said, confused. He ventured to open one eye slightly.  
  
"No," said Sonny. A utility blade nicked out of his cybernetic middle finger and he freed the kid from his bonds.  
  
"I don't know what happened," the kid said, holding his head in his hands. He seemed on the verge of tears. "He hit me from behind I think. I didn't see anyone. I didn't hear him come in. I just woke up here. It must have been hours ago." He stood up to go, Sonny put a hand on his shoulder and forced him back into the chair.  
  
"You see anything missing?"  
  
The kid glanced around the suite. "I don't think so. There's not much to steal around here. There's vid equipment and holo-cams out in the."  
  
"It's still there."  
  
The kid, trying to wipe the blood from his face with his shirt. "I don't know then." Trying to get up, hand on the shoulder, sitting back down.  
  
"Think. You look like a smart kid. Someone broke in, beat you up, tied you up, and just left? Without taking anything?"  
  
"I don't know man, I don't know," glaring and removing hand from shoulder. "I've gotta get out of here. Sorry I can't help you." He got up and tried to shoulder his way out, but Sonny's massive frame was blocking the door. "Hey.you mind getting out of my way?"  
  
"Hang on. I need to ask you a few questions."  
  
"Sorry, man. I don't think you understand the headache I got right now and I don't really care about questions. I need to get home. Will you get the hell out of my way now? Please?" Holding his head, he tried to squeeze past Sonny to the door.  
  
With the back of his heavy, shovel-like hand Sonny slapped the kid across the room where he collided with a tower of cardboard boxes filled with blank digital discs that showered down on his bloody head.  
  
"I asked you to look around," said Sonny. "Try a little harder this time."  
  
The kid scanned the room slowly, fresh blood seeping from his gums. His eyes settled on a black cabinet that was slightly ajar. Sonny followed his eyes and walked over to it, opened it. Inside: digital image storage system, a big cavity in the center of it. Central memory unit gone, pulled out of its housing, ripped wires trailing down the scratched panel.  
  
"What's this for?" said Sonny.  
  
"I don't know."  
  
Sonny glared.  
  
"They don't give me the password. Everything's encrypted."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"You don't know a hell of a lot, do you?"  
  
"There's a backup," the kid said. "Behind that panel."  
  
Behind a wooden wall panel, in a tiny nook packed with sawdust and newspaper, was a smaller memory unit. Condensed organic-matrix drives. Very expensive, very tiny. Roughly the size of a cigarette lighter. Weight: almost seven pounds.  
  
"That's encrypted too," the kid said.  
  
Sonny disconnected the leads and took the backup. "So what exactly do you do here?"  
  
"They make sex movies."  
  
"I didn't ask what they do, I asked about you."  
  
The kid shrugged. "Systems maintenance. I clean the transfer heads. Re- initialize the drivers in the morning. Make small deliveries. That sort of thing. I do some talent scouting too, but otherwise I'm just a stupid errand boy."  
  
Sonny grimaced.  
  
Sonny said "Who runs this show?"  
  
"I d."  
  
"If you say 'I don't know' again, you're going to lose teeth. Give me some names. Who works here, who visits. Who have you seen hanging around. Who pays your check."  
  
The kid thought a moment, daubed at his oozing gums with the elastic collar of his undershirt. He began to enumerate on his fingers: "Tristan Solido. Milos S something.Milos Sigmund I think. I get my money from Jarrett Jex, but he's just a flunkie like me. He mops jizz. I only come in when no one else is really here. Jarrett talks about 'J.O.' sometimes-I just know his initials. I think he owns the building. Umm.some guy called Harper the Nut comes around once in a while." The kid shook his head. "I don't know. Is that enough?"  
  
That last name struck bells for Sonny, and he refrained from smashing the kid in his mouth for saying "I don't know" again. Harper the Nut. Main muscle for Argive Dimitrios, one of Chi-Town's most influential crime bosses, or was once. Sonny had done lots of business with them back when he had an ISS badge. He hadn't seen them too much recently.  
  
"Any of these guys d-bees? Like dogs?"  
  
"D-bees? Hell no. I mean, they could be psychics or closet sorcerers I suppose. I don't think so though."  
  
"You know this girl?" Sonny showed the kid the picture, the sleazy one.  
  
The kid waved it off, shrugged. "Man, lots of girls come through here. It's tough to tell them apart. Who can remember faces? Sluts, strays and runaways," here the kid grinned widely, "you know? They're just pu-"  
  
Sonny slammed his fist into the kid's stomach. The kid collapsed and curled up on the floor, sucking wind, tears streaming down his face leaving tracks as they washed away the dried blood. Sonny lifted the kid up gingerly and put him back in the chair.  
  
"You know, I don't think you told me your name."  
  
The kid gasped. Holding his stomach, still folded up.  
  
"Muh.Muh." the kid heaved. "Martin."  
  
"Martin what?"  
  
"Martin Cuh.Canis."  
  
"Well, Martin Canis," Sonny held the photo up in front of the kid's contorted face. "You ever see this girl before?"  
  
He looked hard, shook his head. "Nuh.no."  
  
"You sure?"  
  
The kid nodded, gulping air.  
  
Sonny ripped a sheet of paper from the editing computer's timecode log and got a pen out. He put them in front of the kid. The kid looked up at him.  
  
"Write," said Sonny. "Tristan Solido, Milos Sigmund, Jarrett Jex. How I can get in touch with them. Addresses, connect serials, hangouts. Whatever you got."  
  
"Wh.what are you going to do with me?"  
  
"Not a damn thing unless you keep stalling when I tell you to do something. Write."  
  
The kid thought for a minute, then started writing. Sonny stood patiently over the kid's shoulder. Then he remembered the drugs in the drawer, went back and pocketed them. Under the many pearlescent baggies was an unlabeled bottle of some strange pharmaceutical Sonny had never seen before. He took it.  
  
"Um.I'm not sure I know anything about Harper the Nut," said the kid.  
  
Sonny straightened. "Him I already know how to find."  
* * *  
Harper the Nut didn't get his name because he was insane or because he was a Crazy, although both were certainly true. Sonny didn't really know why he was called Harper, since he always claimed that his first, middle and last names were all Oswald. But he was called "The Nut" because that's what he thought he was.  
  
Very shortly after undergoing M.O.M. conversion, while the flesh around his cranial implants was still throbbing and red, Oswald O. Oswald, known to his friends as Harper, announced to the world that he was no longer a human being, but a sentient cashew.  
  
Sonny didn't particularly like him. He didn't like any Crazies, for that matter. Not as tough as Juicers, but not as predictable either. He couldn't imagine how anyone ever thought that being given supernatural, mind-over-matter strength and speed was worth being driven completely, utterly, irrevocably batshit insane by the process.  
  
Sonny and Harper had had a business relationship when Sonny was doing work and pulling favors for Harper's boss, Argive Dimitrios, back when Dimitrios had been running half of the Burbs. Argive's fortunes had independently taken a downturn around the same time Sonny went to work for Vin de Siecle. Police pressure coupled with a sudden influx of cutthroat gangsters from out of town had been shrinking his influence and territory. Now his sector of the Burbs was less of a thug monopoly and more of a criminal free-for- all. It was every man for himself. Argive Dimitrios still ruled, but he was no longer supreme.  
  
Sonny walked through the front gate of Dimitrios's Burbs "estate." He waved at the enormous Vanguard Brawler bodyguards watching the front door. They waved back. Sonny went around behind the house, to the chicken coop where Harper slept. He was sitting in the slush and wet hay with a three-gallon drum of peanut butter between his legs. He was greedily scooping it into his mouth with his bare hands. It was all over his face.  
  
The only thing Harper ever ate was peanut butter. Not because he loved peanuts, but because he thought that grinding them up and eating them was a patriotic act of genocide against an inferior nut species.  
  
Sonny walked up the path and knocked on the coop's wooden frame.  
  
"Sonny!" squealed Harper.  
  
"Harper. Haven't they given you a real room yet?"  
  
Harper pointed. "I have chicken wire."  
  
"I see that. You know, you've got a little peanut butter on your face."  
  
Hands, face and bald pink scalp slathered with great gobs of the stuff, Harper paused long enough to say, "Where?" He went diligently back to the task of packing the brown goo into his wide-open mouth.  
  
"How you feeling today, Harper? You feel okay? Think you can answer some questions for me?"  
  
Harper shrugged. Without looking up, he shot at Sonny with a plastic water gun.  
  
Because he was a Crazy, Harper was a pretty unreliable source of information. Sonny knew that it was always difficult to separate the facts from his delusions. But he would be less guarded and suspicious than Dimitrios usually was. He wouldn't get anything for free from Dimitrios. Sonny figured Harper was worth a shot.  
  
Sonny reeled off the address of the place to Harper, asked if he knew it.  
  
Harper nodded.  
  
"What's it for?" said Sonny.  
  
Harper made a tight circle with his thumb and forefinger and enthusiastically rammed a peanut-butter-lubricated finger through the hole about thirty-five times before Sonny asked him to stop already.  
  
"Is it one of Argive's places?"  
  
Harper got sulky, turned his back to Sonny. Sonny realized the man was wearing his coat backwards.  
  
"I guess that's a yes."  
  
"I didn't say yes say yes say yes."  
  
Sonny laughed. "Argive's going to put you in the box if you start having trouble keeping secrets again."  
  
Harper the Nut turned his head around at an angle that seemed anatomically impossible and fixed Sonny in a frighteningly sane glare. Sonny heard vertebrae pop.  
  
Sonny took this as a bad sign. Harper the Nut was not a man you wanted to make angry. Still, there was obviously something going on here. Sonny put up his empty hands in a gesture he hoped Harper would interpret as friendliness.  
  
"C'mon, you can tell me, Harper. We're old friends."  
  
A voice boomed out behind Sonny, hoarse and wine-sodden, unmistakable: Argive Dimitrios.  
  
"You don't have friends, Sonny."  
  
Sonny turned and saw that Dimitrios was standing next to him, virtually touching him. The man knew how to move quietly, he'd give him that. They embraced affectionlessly. Sonny caught a whiff of a peculiar odor that he remembered well: the sex musk from Dimitrios's d-bee whores.  
  
"Sonny," Dimitrios waggled a reproving finger, "You're big man now? I don't see you at club, I don't get no visits. You quit police, you disappear. Dimitrios worries."  
  
"I got a new job."  
  
"I know. Vin de Siecle. You run errands." Dimitrios furrowed his brow sympathetically, "Is very boring I think. Not like old days, yes?"  
  
"Not like old days, no."  
  
"What is you come visit now, Sonny, eh? You need money? Gash? A gun? You say, Dimitrios does."  
  
Sonny flashed the address to Argive.  
  
"One of yours?"  
  
Argive laughed and held up his hands. "Sonny you sound like more cop than when you were cop. How come?"  
  
"I'm looking for someone."  
  
"Looking?" Argive grimaced doubtful. "Finding is okay. Looking not so smart. Who is it?"  
  
"A girl who's been playing around with some." remembering Argive's predilection for nonhuman playmates, "someone she shouldn't be. I'd like to talk to them both. I got this address, but it's shit. Is it yours?"  
  
"Not really. No. No. It is not mine."  
  
"What's Harper doing hanging around there?" Sonny felt the spray of a water gun hit his neck.  
  
"What is Harper doing anywhere?" Dimitrios spun his finger by his temple. "Fucking crazy."  
  
"You protect your turf and it's on your turf. They're making fuck vids it looks like. You make fuck vids. It's not you, you're telling me. Who's is it?"  
  
"Nobody important. It is.you shouldn't. Let's not talk like this. It is nothing, Sonny. And you make Dimitrios uncomfortable. Is it very important."  
  
"Not really. No."  
  
"But worth money to you?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Well, Sonny, since me and you go very far way back I will maybe trade with you. Do me a favor, I would not be so uncomfortable. A favor the boys cannot do. We could talk again about that place me and you Sonny."  
  
"One of the old kind of favors?"  
  
"One of the old kind."  
  
"Sorry, Dimitrios. Not interested."  
  
"You're older now, it's different. You are not my Sonny any more. I understand. I respect that. Things must change. If you change your mind, Sonny, the offer is all open."  
  
"Thanks. But I won't need it. I think I'm just going to give up this thing I'm doing now. Keep the money. I don't need to fool around with this shit. What the fuck could he do to me anyway."  
  
"You skip out on job?" Dimitrios's eyebrow arched sharply. "Man skip out on me, I do plenty."  
  
Sonny knew what Dimitrios would do all right.  
  
"Man skip out on me I have Harper rip his head off. Eat his eyeballs. Shit in his pockets."  
  
Harper hummed to himself. "Done it before done it done it done it before before before," and patted himself three times on each shoulder.  
* * *  
Sonny and Dimitrios went way back together. It was Dimitrios who had used his connections to get Sonny citizenship, and then a badge. It had kept Sonny in his debt for a long time.  
  
Before that, he had given Sonny his first real job when he was still a teenager, doing collections from Dimitrios's various businesses and loanshark customers. Sonny was very good at it. By that point in his life he felt reassured by the sound of bones breaking, of cartilage ripping and tendons snapping like overstressed bowstrings. These things had become almost musical to him, and the work therefore suited his temperament.  
  
Even as a young man, he had been huge, iron-muscled, and a very good hand with a vibro-blade. He also had a very bad reputation. He took pride in the fact that there were even juicers who were afraid of him. Him, a punk kid, unaugmented; no drugs, no implants, no cybernetics. Just meanness. Sonny could always collect.  
  
He had first come to Dimitrios's attention when the boss man had seen him fighting at fourteen, maybe fifteen years of age-it was hard to tell exactly, since Sonny didn't know for sure when he had been born. In that fight, Sonny won the Burbs under-sixteen bare-knuckle championship-again-by shattering his opponent's jaw so completely with one blow, crumpling it like dry kindling, that the boy's seconds had carried him straightaway to the cyber-doc's for an immediate replacement.  
  
Dimitrios bought Sonny from his handlers and immediately put him to work.  
  
Several months later, while Sonny was out on a collection, the boy from the championship ambushed Sonny from behind a burned-out Coalition riot barricade. The kid now had a cybernetically armored cranium and a jaw like a steel bear-trap. His neck was reinforced and steel-plated, and looked as if it could withstand antitank ordnance. The death-red eyes blinked PAYBACK.  
  
After realizing the boy had only taken the trouble to armor his head, Sonny pounded the boy's torso until his cracked collarbone broke loose from his chest and through his skin, the bloody, marrowed edges cutting deep gashes in Sonny's knuckles.  
  
Both the boy's lungs collapsed and he suffocated there among the ashes and empty soft-drink containers. He was the eighteenth human being Sonny had beaten to death with his bare hands. Or nineteenth. He had already lost count. Later on that day, when he had to think hard to remember where the cuts on his knuckles had come from, Sonny realized he couldn't recall the details of the confrontation. He had killed the man out of reflex. For the first time in many years, Sonny was afraid, although of what he couldn't say.  
  
Before Dimitrios had found him, Sonny spent his early teenage days sleeping with prostitutes and his nights fighting for money in the "arenas" of the Burbs and other nearby tramp towns and squatter settlements. Without any desire or means to mark the passage of days, he knew that it had already been a few years since he had come to Chi-town, seeking refuge from the uncivilized wastes. And years before that that he had been orphaned.  
  
When he had first arrived, Sonny, a ragged beggar child, was picked up because of his size and his temper-which had been filed down to a hair trigger by loneliness and a steady diet of street garbage-and placed by his "rescuers" into a back-alley school for young street urchins. He did not have the quickness to be a thief, nor the looks to be a prostitute, and he was placed in a camp for fighters.  
  
The trainers taught him and other children like him to fight with their fists, with clubs, with knives, razors, hatchets, hammers, icepicks. They strung them up and whipped them and burned them so that they would become accustomed to pain and would not fear it. When Sonny bullied other children, he was rewarded with candy and a little pocket money. When he displayed an unnatural ferocity or brutality, he was given liquor and video games, and praised like a hero.  
  
Sonny was the most prodigious student they had ever seen.  
  
It worked like this: trainers from opposing schools pitted their charges against one another in makeshift arenas throughout the Burbs. In the dusty innards of crumbling buildings, in weed-strangled lots, in dank cellars, in freshly dug pits, in sewer tunnels, these lost children of the Burbs met one another with every kind of weapon imaginable while around them hundreds of adults screamed for blood and clutched betting slips to their hearts in feverish ecstasy.  
  
From all over, people flocked to the matches. It got so big they couldn't hide the crowds from the Coalition any more and had to start paying the Burbs ISS Specters for protection. There were no raids, no investigations. Not as long as the Specters-drunken ex-Chi-Town nobodies-got their cash.  
  
The gambling on the fights was intense. That was how the trainers made their money; they were also bookies.  
  
It was a cash cow. There was very little overhead. Children had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat. They were desperate, and therefore a lot cheaper to maintain than adult fighters, who needed things like room and board and a salary.  
  
Children were also more vicious than adults, which the crowd loved. It took a special kind of coldness for an adult to kill another human being in cold blood, in the middle of a public arena. Children could do it with very little prodding. Sonny had killed five boys and one girl before he reached puberty.  
  
Sonny remembered clearly the first person he had ever killed. The boy had shaggy, unwashed red hair, and his back and shoulders were covered in what looked like freckles, although certain swellings and discolorations gave it away for what it was: pre-cancerous melanoma.  
  
It was Sonny's first death match. Eleventh for the redhead. Sonny was a 12-to-3 underdog. The venue was a collapsed building that could once have been a high school gymnasium: bleachers and warped wood floors with obscure circles and markings painted on them. Only one wall was still standing. It was mid-spring and the night was cool and breezy; the packed crowd reeked of sweat and alcohol. The scene was lit by oil drums burning garbage.  
  
After two minutes of grappling, biting and gouging, dodging and blocking, Sonny managed to fit his icepick between the boy's ribs and into his heart. The boy's eyes went wide in shock. Sonny pulled the pick out. A pulsing stream of blood twice shot out of the tiny wound, like a water-gun, and trinkled across Sonny's face.  
  
The boy looked into Sonny's eyes and his freckled lips began to tremble. He slowly sat down in the sand and, never taking his eyes off Sonny, fell onto his back. The hole in his chest squirted blood into the air like a little geyser with each remaining beat of his heart. Sonny thought the boy was about to start crying, but his eyes glassed over before they could shed any tears and then he died.  
  
Sonny's handlers were extremely pleased with the outcome of the match.  
  
"Congratulations, my boy. Congratulations," said Magister Loody, the head of the stable that owned Sonny. "We cleaned up so well on that last one, we all thought to give you your first taste of a special treat. You're ten years old now."  
  
"I am?"  
  
"Well, probably. You look it, at least. Maybe you're only nine. At any rate, you're a big boy now, and we thought it was time you started getting big boy privileges. If we could give you one thing that you always wanted, what would it be?"  
  
"I want to go find my sister." No hesitation.  
  
"Hnh. We were thinking more along the lines of this." Magister Loody held up a bottle filled with a glaucous, hallucinogenic syrup. He smiled and gave it a little shake. The label was emblazoned with a popular video-game character, sheets of blue lightning flying off his impossibly rippling musculature and unnaturally angular hairdo.  
  
"It's what all the older ones get after a good fight," said Loody, clearly nonplussed at Sonny's lack of enthusiasm. The other boys and girls in the Loody stable were willing to move heaven and earth to get a taste of the stuff.  
  
"I want to go find my sister."  
  
Loody frowned, tossing the bottle back in his desk and slamming the drawer. "Sister. Where? Out there? Son," he said, indicating the wasteland, "Forget it. Forget about ever seeing her again. She's gone."  
  
"How do you know?"  
  
"Because out there isn't a place where human beings last very long. The Burbs might be bad, but believe me.we've got it easy compared to those doomed losers out there."  
  
"Have you ever been to the wasteland?"  
  
Magister Loody glared icily. He snapped his fingers, sat down and started calculating the odds on the next spate of matches happening along the trade trails leading to Quebec. This was the signal indicating that Sonny was dismissed. Sonny did not move.  
  
Loody looked up, surprised that Sonny was still there, defiant. He shook his head, not unkindly. He sighed theatrically.  
  
"C'mon. Where would you even start looking?"  
  
That was a question that had not occurred to Sonny. He didn't have an answer, and he felt embarrassed.  
  
"Time goes forward, kid, not back. You better start living here, in the present. Only thing in the past is memories and dead people."  
  
Sonny didn't move, but his resolve was visibly weakening.  
  
"Keep your mind on that, always, always now. You don't, one day you'll look down and see someone's put a blade between your ribs because you weren't paying attention. Just remember that you're alive."  
  
That stopped him. He'd heard it before. Different voice, different face: his sister. He hardly even remembered her name. Bonnie? Betty? Bessie?  
  
"Remember you're alive." She held close to his arm as they walked from the stinking, dust-choked hut of scrap and debris. Inside, on a filth-stiff floormat, their mother. Dead since the night before. Sonny's sister pulled him back for another look, another goodbye.  
  
A dysenteric plague had swept through the camp. All of the adults had caught it. By the time they figured out it was something in the camp's booze, most of them were already dead. Sonny's mother had for days been delirious, unable to move, unable to speak, laugh, cry. Convulsed by unpredictable jets of thin bloody vomit and rice-like diarrhea. First her hair fell out, then her teeth. Her skin turned a mottled olive, dried up and became gritty, but tore bloodlessly like old soggy paper. Sometimes she moaned for hours, eyes wide and glassy. Sometimes she banged her head against the ground, and then against her children when they tried to keep her still. Then she died. "Remember you're alive, Sonny. You still have me. I'm not sick. We have to go."  
  
Sonny had no problems leaving, although he knew his sister wanted to stay. Sonny was glad it was over. His sister was saying the same thing over and over.  
  
She had wrapped up their mother's teeth in Sonny's old dogskin bib and tied it with a thin string of braided hair, Sonny's first wispy baby hairs. They were going to be taking a trip; Sonny became excited. He took the house book: the first half of a coverless Oliver Twist, ripped down the center of the spine by the woman, their neighbor, who had originally found the archaeological treasure, and in whose possession was the other half. She and her husband and her one-year-old daughter, whose teething gums they would soothe with some of the liquor from the camp still, were all engaged in the process of dying.  
  
Sonny and his sister left the hut for good, taking nothing else with them. There was nothing else to take: spoiled food, junk. Every container and absorbent material had been used to carry away or sop up their mother's dying expulsions. They left the hut behind and began to walk toward the morning sun, past rows and rows of half-clothed children sitting around looking dazed and lost. Sonny and his sister walked to the perimeter, squirreled under the scrap-iron barricades, then out of the camp forever.  
* * *  
After talking to Dimitrios, Sonny didn't particularly feel like wasting any more time in the Burbs. He flipped back over to the big gate: ID, questions, pat-down, weapon and contraband scan. He was greenstamped to return to Chi-Town. He bought a roast chicken and a twelve-pack of flavored synthetic ethanol on the way home.  
  
When he returned to his apartment a texty from de Siecle was waiting. He wanted Sonny to pay a surprise visit to the ex-boyfriend of one of his crushes. Sonny put the food down and started towards the door, started back into his apartment, started for the door, stopped. He visualized his apartment, his building, the whole city blown to pieces, every brick and screw, nail and bolt, flying, arms and legs falling like rain. He visualized it all falling down and burying him in a cold and quiet black tomb forever and his heart kept bursting in and out, in and out, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding like a broken machine.  
  
He looked up. The building, the apartment was still there. The texty was still there. He was still there. He was stiff all over. His thoughts went cold furnace. He changed clothes and went back out again. 


End file.
